How to Migrate from Metaio to Catchoom

Congratulations to Metaio on their now-confirmed acquisition by Apple – we’re excited about the future of the augmented reality industry and believe this acquisition takes us one step closer to augmented reality being a mainstream reality. Kudos for Thomas and Peter!

For the 150,000-strong community of Metaio developers, and particularly for those customers of Metaio Creator who need to migrate to an alternative platform, we’d like to lend a helping hand.

Migration from Metaio to CraftAR platform in four steps

Here’s a quick guide on how you can migrate to CraftAR in four easy steps:

Check the equivalents in the section below to ensure we support the feature you need.

or check out our Support Center if you need tutorials and best practices with CraftAR.

Catchoom boasts one of the world’s most accurate image recognition software coupled with the easiest to use AR toolbox, with plugins for PhoneGap, Cordova and Unity3D as well as a Javascript library to access image recognition straight from a web browser.

With more than 420 million interactions across the globe, we’re open for business and are proud sponsors of the Augmented World Expo in Silicon Valley on June 8-10th 2015.

Metaio – CraftAR product equivalent

In a nutshell, the Metaio Suite (including Metaio Cloud) is CraftAR. CraftAR includes among other features described below, a web interface to manage all of your content, storage for your assets (like 3D models), and analytics.

There are four products of Metaio with a CraftAR equivalent that deserve a special attention:

Metaio SDKs and CraftAR Augmented Reality SDK

Our Augmented Reality SDK is the perfect fit if you were using the Metaio SDK Basic. In terms of pricing, our SDK has a one-off fee to remove the watermark that appears in its free version, and requires a CraftAR subscription if you need cloud support. Check our pricing for further details.

Check the following list of features in our SDK – using Metaio’s terminology:

Included:

Image-based tracking

Mature solution with tracking and rendering

Optimized 3d rendering for AR (especially for video playback)

iOS, Android and Unity

Create offline or online apps

Not included (mainly Metaio SDK Pro):

3D Object tracking with CAD models

SLAM

AREL scripting

Shaders (use baked textures instead)

PC version

Metaio Creator and CraftAR Creator

Our Content Creator instead of requiring to download a PC app, runs on any modern web browser and is the perfect fit if you want to design your experiences with non-programming skills. In terms of pricing, our creation tool does not require to be bought separately, instead it is already included in your CraftAR account, and can be tried for free.

Check the following list of features in our Content Creator – using Metaio’s terminology:

Included:

360 degree AR (Unity plugin)

2+ AR experiences loaded simultaneously

Graphical AR experience creator

Create cloud-based mobile apps

Publish to Metaio Cloud (CraftAR Cloud Service)

Not included:

Face Tracking

Image Trackability Assessment (coming soon)

2+ items tracked simultaneously (but possible in our SDK)

AREL scripting

Metaio Continuous Visual Search and CraftAR Image Recognition API

The CraftAR Cloud Image Recognition API is our secret weapon and has already been three years in the market. Pricing-wise, our service can be tried for free and requires a subscription that grows with the number of images. We have different, tailored plans to fit your needs.

The main difference with Metaio CVS is that we do not require experiences to be augmented. With our content management system, you can set experiences that lead directly to webs or videos stored online, or product descriptions for price comparison apps for instance.

Junaio and the CraftAR mobile app

The CraftAR mobile app is the tool you can use – with no development effort – to test and also to show potential customers your AR experiences published in CraftAR. Check this tutorial to learn how to use the CraftAR mobile app.

The main difference with Junaio is that it is not designed as a comercial app. A new release is coming up soon to foster sharing with customers and partners.